Batch, Redis Cache, and Service Fabric offerings generally available for Azure Government

Dan

October 17th, 2016

We’re pleased to announce the general availability of Batch, Redis Cache, and Service Fabric in Microsoft Azure Government.

Batch

Azure Batch is our job scheduling and compute pool management service that helps developers easily scale their compute-intensive workloads to tens, hundreds, or thousands of virtual machines without having to manage the infrastructure. As a managed service, Azure Batch handles the heavy lifting of provisioning, monitoring and scaling virtual machines. You create an Azure Batch account, within minutes have the resources you require, and can scale up and down as the volume of jobs and tasks change. Batch helps you handle spikes; you pay for what you use.

Azure Redis Cache is a distributed, in-memory, managed cache that helps you build highly scalable and responsive applications, by providing you with fast access to your data. It’s based on the popular open-source Redis Cache, and it gives you access to a secured, dedicated Redis cache that’s managed by Microsoft.

Azure Redis Cache is offered in the following tiers:

Basic:This is a single cache node, multiple sizes, ideal for development/test and non–critical workloads. The basic tier has no SLA.

Standard:This is a replicated cache in a two-node Primary/Secondary configuration. Microsoft manages automatic replication between the two nodes. Ahigh availability SLA is available on the Standard tier.

Premium:The new Premium tier includes a high availability SLA and all the Standard-tier features and more, such as better performance over Basic or Standard-tier Caches, bigger workloads, disaster recovery, and enhanced security. Additional features include:

Redis persistence allows you to persist data stored in Redis cache. You can also take snapshots and back up the data which you can load in case of a failure.

Redis cluster automatically shards data across multiple Redis nodes, so you can create workloads of bigger memory sizes (greater than 53 GB) and get better performance.

Azure Virtual Network (VNET) deployment provides enhanced security and isolation for your Azure Redis Cache, as well as subnets, access control policies, and other features to further restrict access.

Basic and Standard caches are available in sizes up to 53 GB and Premium caches are available in sizes up to 530 GB.

Benefits include:

High performance: Azure Redis Cache helps your application become more responsive, even as user load increases. It also leverages the low-latency, high-throughput capabilities of the Redis engine. This separate distributed cache layer allows your data tier to scale independently for more efficient use of compute resources in your application layer.

Easy to use and manage: Provision Redis cache using Powershell. You can use Redis from most programming languages used today. In the upcoming weeks you will also be able to easily manage and monitor health and performance in the new portal. Let Microsoft manage replication of the cache for increased availability.

Service Fabric is a mature, feature-rich microservices application platform with built-in support for lifecycle management, stateless and stateful services, performance at scale, 24×7 availability, and cost efficiency.Service Fabric integrates with Azure features and services, making operations and management simpler, and leveraging the power of Azure cloud.Service Fabric is available at no additional cost in Azure – you only pay for the underlying compute, network and storage used by your Service Fabric Cluster and microservices.

Benefits include:

Streamlined provisioning of clusters through Azure Resource Manager

Enhanced reliability during host OS update and

Automated upgrades to the Service Fabric runtime without downtime to your application

We welcome your comments and suggestions to help us continually improve your Azure Government experience. To stay up to date on all things Azure Government, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed and to receive emails, click “Subscribe by Email!” on the Azure Government Blog. To experience the power of Azure Government for your organization, sign up for an Azure Government Trial.